Followup on the "handwritten forms" If you are able to convert these forms into a multiple-choice form that people fill in boxes by hand, instead of writing actual words on them, I can Tell you how to convert these into actual data output. At my office we have this customer satisfaction survey thing that we do periodically, and For a zillion unrelated reasons it has to be handed out on paper. The department doing it was wringing their hands over this as it would take Hours and hours and hours for some poor soul to go through all of the forms and input the results into a spreadsheet.
I looked into commercial products that do this - and there's only 1 company out there that sells software nowadays for this - Tungsten Automation. These turkeys have been spending the last decade buying up every company in the "hybrid paper workflows" market and they now have a complete monopoly on it - and literally they sell complete systems, they no longer sell standalone software that does forms conversions. Pricing is quote-only and it's in the low 5 figures. I found an open source software program for this and built a system around it - so now, they just feed the 300 or so paper surveys into the hopper in a scanner like what I just linked to, and all the resulting PDF's get fed into the system and the data is then loaded into a MariaDB database. I then took their Excel spreadsheet and converted it into a front end using the ODBC drivers for MariaDB. Works slick saves hours of drudgery. Anyway, this is only good for multiple choice click box forms that people fill out by hand. For OCR of cursive or handwritten printing - good effing luck. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of VY Sent: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 4:47 AM To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help, civil and on-topic <[email protected]> Subject: [PLUG] document scanner Dear All I am looking for a good document scanner that is Linux compatible. Better yet if it is Raspberry Pi compatible. I have a bunch of forms that have hand writing on them. I will be getting them on a regular basis and I like to scan them and convert them to high-resolution PDFs. Any pointer for such a scanner is much appreciated. -Vincent
